Jesse Draxler is an American artist who makes monochrome collage, painting and photography built from appropriated commercial imagery. Born into an automobile-repair family in rural Wisconsin, he lives and works in Los Angeles. He treats deconstruction and reconstruction as his central method, reclaiming found imagery, much of it drawn from fashion advertising, and remaking it into what he calls “my world, not anyone else's”.
Draxler holds a bachelor's degree in fine arts and wrote his graduate thesis on the commodification of punk rock and subculture aesthetics. He began posting his work on Tumblr in 2008, and The New York Times published his first illustration in 2011. In 2014 he created the album cover PlectrumElectrum for Prince with photographer Madison Dube, and the following year he moved to Los Angeles and shifted his focus toward fashion. He worked as artist and art director on McQ's Swallow collection, and held his first solo exhibition in New York City in 2016. His monochrome palette stems from his color blindness. He has described black and white as the “architecture of an image”, grounding its composition, balance and form. In 2018 he published the 200-page art book MISOPHONIA with Sacred Bones Records and made his first documented sale of physical art for cryptocurrency, for 1 ETH.
